Today feels like a nice writing day. I’ve been riding a lot and having the most splendid time doing so, but the weather finally caught up with me this weekend. My friend Roger has somehow managed to ride hard AND write hard over the last couple of weeks, so I’ll let him take the reigns for now while I string together a thought or two over here. Roger and I see the world in a similarly romantic way, but his particular neurosis involves a much larger vernacular bouncing around than mine. I think I can say that. If I were him, I’d be exhausted from constantly looking up the words being said by my internal monologue. Maybe you could describe his outlook as more oil painting, whereas I’m more point-&-shoot digital camera that has trouble focusing. As usual, I digress. Here’s (f)Rog:
Cycling through Academia 1
Cycling was recently banned on several Carnegie Mellon walkways because ambitious undergraduates would tear around campus on squealing bicycles, perilously barreling through the vault of Purnell Center, scattering their slow peers before them, knocking into the ones that didn’t jump out of the way, disrupting the tunes of the drama kids, this in righteous pursuit of studies that honored them and their families. One of these ambitious cyclists, on a spring day that did not yet seem committed to the change of seasons, a day that dwelt as if of two minds to past and present, once bowled over the Hebert A Simon Chuzzlewitt II professor of Literature* as she was walking to visit the cherries that grace the statue of Mao Yisheng in his court outside Baker Hall with blossoms that superimpose themselves over the architrave of meandering modilions that had slid down from its proper place on the uppermost part of the facade. This professor (who was working on a piece that no one would read or understand) as she picked herself up, shouted after the swift-moving cyclist “what stupid ambition!” but the speeding genius was already too far away to hear the curse of the tenured sage.
Scrolls
On a visit to my friend’s I took riverside trails from Deutschtown to Regent Square. I passed over the Mon twice then, once on Hot Metal and then on Homestead Grays. The river tossed brown scrolls beneath me. Bronze? No, brown. Having traversed the river for the second time I made my way along the clear stream named Nine Mile that flows through the woods of Frick defiles. On the banks of these waters, flowers optimistic for spring bloomed beneath leafing trees shot through with evening’s calm rays. Because I was in a rush to arrive at my destination, I did not have time to wonder if the flowers were daffodils, marys, hepaticas, or larkspurs.
